It's bad... but the watchdog has got the message

Saturday 11 July 2009 19.01 EDT
First published on Saturday 11 July 2009 19.01 EDT

This is "one of the most significant media stories of modern times", says Andrew Neil, once a Murdoch henchman but now best beloved by the brothers Barclay. Shame on the House of Rupert! And look, here's the most significant political story of modern times, featuring MPs and their sleazy expenses, as exposed by the Barclays' Telegraph. Press behaviour horror and a triumph of investigatory zeal - with one hell of a grey area in between.

Why did the Times and the Sun both turn down the shadowy middleman who offered them an illicit computer disc of Parliament's darkest secrets for a mere £300,000? Nobody involved has ever explained directly, but let's say lawyers talking theft, privacy and data protection were loud in the decision-making process. Let's also say that, after the hammering News International took when Andy Coulson resigned as editor of the News of the World, Wapping was being super-careful.

That turned out a bad call: the public interest in what the disc revealed proved so great that nobody - bar Speaker Martin for about five benighted seconds - thought of calling in the Yard. But now, with hundreds, going on supposed thousands, of hacking telephone calls and similar stunts to consider, the boot is on a different foot.

MPs have a chance to vent spleen - and go to it with a will. Labour faithful anxious to knock some away some of David Cameron's saintly aura have his spinmeister Coulson in their sights. Critics of the Press Complaints Commission see their target clear again. Murdoch foes across the Atlantic are hugging themselves at the prospect of his Dow Jones CEO, Les Hinton, having to troop back to Westminster and explain why he didn't mention a million or so in secret payments to some of those who were bugged. Celebrities summon eager solicitors. It's a six-ring circus of wrath, calculation and axe-grinding, gaining portent as it goes.

But should newspapers - or anyone - employ seedy private eyes to hack out information that rightly belongs to us alone? Of course not. Forget PCC codes, telephone hacking has been illegal for almost a decade. Clive Goodman of the News of the World and the dodgy detective who fed him royal titbits both went to prison. There's no reason why future transgressors shouldn't hear heavy doors slam behind them, too.

What isn't quite clear enough yet, though, is the timing of transgressions past as they affect Coulson when he was deputy editor of the News of the World (to Rebekah Wade), then editor - appointments stretching from 2003 to January 2007. If (as Nick Davies in his pungent Guardian exclusive claims) hacking was commonplace in the newsroom of the time, with Goodman far from an isolated case, then Coulson seems either a fool or a knave; and Hinton, who vowed Goodman was a solitary case, is in much the same plight.

Yet something's missing here. It isn't news that Fleet Street fished in murky electronic waters. On 10 May 2006, Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, published a thunderous report called "What Price Privacy Now?" where he warned of gross media intrusions. Six months later, he followed through with a second report that provided the number of transactions with private eye intermediaries "positively identified" by his office.

Score 952 for the Daily Mail, 802 for the Sunday People, 681 for the Daily Mirror, 266 for the Mail on Sunday and only 182 for Coulson's News of the World (a mere 19 reporters initially identified, as opposed to 58 on the Mail). But don't forget, either, that the Observer, Sunday Times and many more titles, including Woman's Own, were also in the frame.

There are crucial details here. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 has no possible public interest defence appended, while the Data Protection Act - covering hacking into a computer, for instance, as well as generally "blagging" information by deceit - has a public interest element that can be pleaded in court. There's a practical difference, too, between blagging the telephone number of someone a reporter needs to interview for defined investigatory purpose and recording calls to a celebrity's mobile as part of a general trawl.

Some Scotland Yard sources who talked to the Guardian about "thousands" of this or that may have been mixing their hacks and blags (which would be different cases under different acts). Some transactions featuring Glenn Mulcaire, the investigator who went to jail, must have fallen in both categories, too. And since Mulcaire, like others in his line of business, took orders far and wide, some of the other papers on the information commissioner's list were probably ordering hacks as well.

So this isn't just pain for News International, and you'd have thought the select committee and the PCC would have realised as much as they heard those reassurances from Hinton and Coulson. They need to ask why they themselves seemed oblivious to the Information Commission's evidence.

But when the PCC issued its amplified warning after Goodman, it did succeed in scrapping the hacks. Self-regulation worked. Scotland Yard, which gathered the evidence that convicted Goodman and Mulcaire, does not seem inclined to push further. Unlike the "most significant political story of modern times", acts were mostly cleaned up after an awful warning, rather than too late.

Don't sell the shabby dealings and evasions of all this short - but don't rock with melodramatic horror, either.

Robinson utters, then the endless bloggers mutter

Nick Robinson, the BBC's increasingly authoritative political editor, doesn't read the responses to his own Newslog on bbc.co.uk, he said: they're just not interesting enough. And that's true if (unlike Nick) you scan the 250 or so comments that followed his piece last week about a weary government struggling to get its budget measures through. Lemmings aboard gravy trains plunge off cliffs, tired PMs should be "retired", pigs wallow in ancestral troughs and so on in desultory, vituperative fashion. Not a whisper of understanding or original insight around.

Why is the political verdict on Gordon Brown so venomous? asks Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian. Perhaps, in part, because "those who post their thoughts on the Guardian website compare him to Robert Mugabe, presiding over what they call 'ZaNuLab'," he replies. Insults, rants and adjectives deleted serve instead of argument or analysis.

There'll be hundreds more postings on the "arrogance" of Nick, Jonathan and any professional journalist who utters a word out of place. But the whole edifice of digital chat and counter-chat depends on genuine back-and-forth. Both sides need to read and be read. You blog to jaw, and not to bore.

Being saintly doesn't mean you sell

It would be nice to look at June's national newspaper ABC circulation figures, released this weekend, and find sanctity rewarded by sweeter sales. And you can make a good start along that track. Take the five biggest blaggers denounced by the Information Commission: the Mail is down 1.35% year-on-year, the People 8.3%, the Mirror 9.54%, the Mail on Sunday a startling 6.58% and the hackless News of the World 4.79%

But even holy crystal balls become clouded as the Sun and Star, head to head at 20p throughout most of the land, go up 1.48% and 3.45% respectively on May's figures, and the Express, also playing a price-lopping game, adds 1.36%.

Though the Telegraph soldiered on with its expenses scoop, sales only bobbed up 0.12% (and are 3.46% down on June 2008). And as for the utterly blameless Independent on Sunday, down 2.98% in a month and 22.47% in a year, what is there left to do except pray? Sanctity matters, but it doesn't always pay the rent.